Texas Trip part II, chain saws and power outages

So this is a restaurant in Taylor, TX.  The top rated restaurant was closed on Sunday.  We should have driven to the next town, in my opinion, but Carl LOVES to eat at local dives. Dive here is the optimal word!  You know it will be tricky to find a good restaurant in a town when Sonic and McDonald's are rated as places to eat on tripadvisor!!

As we drove through town, we saw lots of cars but no people. Kaitlin said that she has seen too many NCIS's to not think something was strange.  I am so sorry I didn't get a picture of the outside of the building.  So use your imagination here and work with me. Picture a derelict building with maybe three cars. - My rule is usually 7 cars and windows but I threw caution to the wind for Carl. - Try to imagine a beer sign in the window and bars on said windows. BARS ON THE WINDOWS! Is the hair standing up on the back of your neck yet?  Mine was.  The inside was not much better. There was a bar and several tables. I was thankful that we had plastic silverware and paper plates.  I felt some better when a family came in to eat.  Kaitlin noticed that lots of folks got their food to go.

Carl loved his food.  Mine was so-so.  The chain saw that I kept hearing was a little distracting.  What were we really eating?  Carl assured me it was an electric knife.  hmmmm.  Our waitress was very nice.  I was not sad when it was time to leave!


We got to our motel in Austin and unpacked.  We tried to connect with Kay and Jullian- you will meet them again soon- but they were delayed by a lost suitcase.  We decided to eat at Perry's but it was closed on Sunday.  Carl and Kaitlin found several restaurants that we could walk to and we decided on Ruth's Chris Steak House.  It was good.  About half way through our dinner a Large group of REALLY TALL people all in running suits came in.  We noticed that the running suits had the word Tigers on them.  After a quick text to Andrew, we learned that Missouri was planning to play Texas the next night.  MO won by one point.

I got up early on Monday morning and proceeded to engage in one of my favorite activities.  Window watching.  Here is what I saw.  A picture here is not worth a 1000 words.  You can't see the man-hole with the four men working under the ground just beyond the truck with the cones behind it.  They were working furiously.  You also can't see the homeless folks that were waked up by the garage truck that picked up the trash cans they were huddled behind.  I was describing all this to Carl and Kaitlin when Carl had to come and take a look see.  He informed me that what I was seeing was a mobile generator and that there must have been a power outage.  I watched out the window every chance I could and the men worked all day and into the night.  They even put up a little tent over the man hole so the men could work in the rain that came in the afternoon.  That night on the news we saw that sure enough there had been an outage and we were seeing the men work to fix it.  When we woke up on Tuesday all the work men were gone.

 My window watching after that was not so exciting.

On Sunday we also went to the LBJ presidential library.  More on that tomorrow...